Friday, May 18, 2012

Eggcellent!

Recently, I've been trying out a bunch of brunch recipes in order to prepare for the summer sleepovers and the late blinky mornings where no one wants to do anything, ESPECIALLY stand in front of a hot stove. Additionally, I've been seeing a lot of baked breakfast recipes and they have intrigued me. I decided to start with the basics before I got adventurous, the quiche & the frittata. I'm not going to get too bogged down with the cooking technicalities for these dishes as they are pretty readily available.

The Quiche

I looked at a few recipes prior to starting my quiche and I decided that I wasn't going to use heavy cream and instead substituted for half skim and half whole milk. I didn't want to deviate too far from the original on my first go around.
In the interest of saving some time, I also used one of those prepared frozen pie crusts that they sell in the supermarket. I knew I was going to make this for dinner and so, I had it defrosting in the refrigerator while I was at work.

The cooking time for this was 40 minutes at 350 degrees F. My oven tends to run a bit warmer so I opted for the lower temperature. I used tomato, spinach, and crumbled fennel sausage with parmesan cheese as the filling.

The Frittata!

I decided to use spinach, chopped up baby asparagus, mushrooms and asiago cheese in my frittata. This was SO easy to make and I'm already plotting a leek and potato one in the future. I had some left overs with this and I sliced them up and had them for lunch with a salad. Delicious!

Side note; I didn't have an issue with it, but some of the places I found recipes using spinach in a frittata warn about overcooking and undercooking the spinach. For obvious reasons you don't want the spinach raw, but, if you over cook the spinach you run the risk of all of it settling at the bottom.

Also, I didn't add any cream to mine. I did however add a splash of skim milk and whipped the egg whites separately before mixing in the yolks. I wanted this to be on the lighter side and it seemed to work.

After it was all said and done I found that I personally preferred the Frittata. I preferred it's texture and I found it to be less dense than the quiche. Plus, it's just so much fun to say. Frittata!